• Question: What does been a scientist actually mean?

    Asked by meggy to Betul, Bridget, Ceri-Wyn, Laurel, Maria on 20 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Maria Pawlowska

      Maria Pawlowska answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      It means that for a living you ask interesting questions and look for ways to answer them – it’s great! It involves talking to loads of smart, interesting people, discussing ideas, coming up with new ideas, new experiments and new ways of thinking about things. And it’s also quite a lot of writing and reading papers, books, more papers, emails and then another paper or two 🙂

    • Photo: Laurel Fogarty

      Laurel Fogarty answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      What science actually is is actually a huge question in itself. Philosophers have been debating this since time beganMATOMO_URL I think the best definition of science was given by Karl Popper, an Austrian philosopher. He said that for a theory to be scientific you have to be able to test it. If you test it and it does not fail your test, the theory can survive to be tested again.

      This way of doing science means that when we find fresh and new information, we can change our ideas and always be a little more right.

      So I think that being a scientist means testing theories and ideas, if they pass testing them again and if they fail, coming up with something better.

      (*this may be an exaggeration)

    • Photo: Bridget Waller

      Bridget Waller answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Being a scientist can mean different things depending on the specific job that people have. There are many, many different types of scientist. The main common factor is that scientists ask questions about the world and use scientific methods to test hypotheses.

    • Photo: Ceri-Wyn Thomas

      Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2010:

      Being a scientist means that you ask questions about the world then try to answer those questions using what’s called the ‘Scientific Method’. This means you must formulate a hypothesis (a statement about something), then perform experiments and gather data to test whether that statement is true or false. However, as well as acquiring new knowledge and investigating new things through asking questions about the world, scientists also gather previous knowledge together to look for patterns or to see whether it needs correcting or improving!

    • Photo: Betul Arslan

      Betul Arslan answered on 20 Jun 2010:

      Phew, good question! I think it means to have the responsibility and the courage to dare asking the most unknown questions and willing to solve them.

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